Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Human and Temporal Connectivities

Nina Engelhardt, Julia Hoydis, Nina Engelhardt, Julia Hoydis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030194895
• eBook ISBN: 9783030194901
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama. The ten case studies, covering a range of British and American texts from the late twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, reflect the diversity of representations of science in contemporary fiction, including psychopharmacology and neuropathology, quantum physics and mathematics, biotechnology, genetics, and chemical weaponry. This collection considers how texts engage with science and technology to explore relations between bodies and minds, how such connectivities shape conceptions and narrations of the human, and how the speculative view of science fiction features alongside realist engagements with the Victorian period and modernism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, contributors offer new insights into narrative engagement with science and its place in life today, in times past, and intimes to come.Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License vialink.springer.com.

© The Author(s) 2019

N. Engelhardt, J. Hoydis (eds.)Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century FictionPalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century

Nina Engelhardt¹ and Julia Hoydis²

(1)

University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

(2)

University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

End Abstract

Science and technology more than ever govern human lives. While it has become a commonplace observation that the twenty-first century is marked by scientific and technological change on an unprecedented scale, it remains a challenge to map the implications for contemporary fictional representations. The present volume tackles a specific part of this challenge, addressing scientific and literary innovations as well as continuities and returns. Twenty-first-century writing in the field of literature and science obviously stands in a long tradition of writers and scholars that “have reflected on, reimagined, and challenged the sciences for over two millennia” (Sielke 2015, 12), and the topic of science and/in fiction shows no signs of decline as the third millennium progresses, neither in terms of artistic production nor as an area of critical enquiry. In contemporary drama, for example, science has been seen to become “the hottest topic in theatre today, so much so that it’s identifiable as a millennial phenomenon on the English-speaking stage” (Rocamora 2000, 50). Likewise, there has been a wave of popular films about scientists over the last years, including screen works such as A Beautiful Mind (2001), Proof (2005), Ramanujan (2014), The Imitation Game (2014), A Theory of Everything (2014), The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), and Hidden Figures (2016). In prose fiction, the “science novel” (see Schaffeld 2016) has attracted significant attention and branched out into a variety of topical interests and genres, running the gamut from popular science, speculative fiction, and apocalyptic disaster narratives to new realist and historical novels, including ‘brain memoirs’ (see Tougaw 2017, 2018) and ‘neuronovels’ (see Roth 2009), ‘cli-fi’ (see Johns-Putra 2016; Trexler 2015; Schneider-Mayerson 2017), and the field of ‘posthuman’ fiction, including, most recently, ‘AI narratives.’¹ In addition, the impact of digitalisation across all media and genres and on twenty-first-century culture in general affects modes of artistic and knowledge production and reception.

If the representation of science in novels, films, plays, and poetry does not show any signs of decline, neither does the field of literature and science studies. Recent scholarly publications predominantly focus on a single genre and a single scientific discipline, as a look at books published in the first half of the year 2018 reveals: Rachel Crossland’s Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, Nina Engelhardt’s Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics, John Fitch’s The Poetry of Knowledge and the ‘Two Cultures,’ Lianne Habinek’s The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience, Jenni Halpin’s Contemporary Physics Plays: Making Time to Know Responsibility, Andrea K. Henderson’s Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture, and Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender. Unlike these books, this volume does not focus on any one particular genre or branch of science (e.g. physics, biology, or mathematics), yet, it shares with various publications a special concern with Victorian and modernist cultures and a focus on a specific time period—in our case, the ‘now.’ Thus, the volume breaks new ground with its focus on twenty-first-century representations of science, as well as by offering a comparatively rare combination of contributions covering diverse scientific disciplines and different genres. Addressing novelistic fiction, poetry, film, and drama, and engaging with topics such as genetics, chemical weapons research, quantum physics, psychopharmacology, biotechnology, and digital technologies, this volume avoids delimiting the complexity of the field or the vagueness that investigations into the contemporary necessarily entail (see Boxall 2013, 3; Hoydis 2015, 5; Lea 2017, 2).

The organisation of ten case studies in two sections, ‘Human Connectivities—Speculations and (Corpo)Realities’ and ‘Temporal Connectivities—(Neo-)Victorian to (Neo-)Modernist,’ reflects that the contributions in this volume approach representations of science from two main angles: in view of the place of the human in a web of relations (human connectivities) and regarding links between the twenty-first century and historical periods (temporal connectivities). We introduce the term ‘connectivity’ specifically to liberate thinking about literature and science from the rather tired metaphor of ‘two cultures,’ the only slightly less tired derivatives ‘three cultures’ or ‘one culture,’ as well as from the increasingly popular all-embracing concept of ‘networks.’ Connectivity, as we understand it, does not emphasise boundaries, disciplinary cultures, or institutional settings but is relational and encompasses realities as well as potentialities: as in popular and technical usage, we take ‘connectivity’ to mean both the quality and state of being connected and the capability of “being connective or connected” (“connectivity,” Merriam-Webster). Referring to an actual state as well as to possibility, the use of ‘connectivities’ pays tribute to the both real and speculative aspects of representations of science in twenty-first-century fiction. As we develop below, the term evokes globality and technology as the central means of experiencing connections in the present day and age, yet equally allows for the incorporation of historical and ethical dimensions. First, however, we examine how using the concept of ‘connectivities’ to grasp the relationship between science and literature offers a way to bracket questions of linear influence and direct connections, as well as to break open (for lack of a better term) the ‘network’ paradigm which often seems to suggest a systemic view.

In the twenty-first century, the term ‘network’ and its derivatives are seemingly everywhere, from talk about the Internet, social networks such as Facebook, and Manuel Castells’s notion of the ‘network society’ as a society relying on the fundamental unit of networks that are based on flow of information in electronic forms and function on a global scale (see 2000, 60–1). Next to organisational networks and digital networking technologies, the term has undergone influential reconfiguration in Actor—Network Theory (ANT), most closely related to the name Bruno Latour. Latour acknowledges the infelicity of the term in ANT, not least because what is meant to designate a method is frequently confused with a thing, for example a technical network. “Network is a concept, not a thing out there,” Latour explains, and admits, “The word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago” (Latour 2005, 131; 130). As a more fitting term to describe the work, movement, and change that the method entails, he offers ‘worknet’ but deems a change in terminology impractical (see 143; 132). This collection avoids the “terribly confusing” and “pretty horrible” (142) word ‘network’ with its competing meanings in common usage and ANT, and instead proposes to focus on ‘connectivity,’ which includes real and potential connections, local as well as global ones, and can involve merely two entities or an entire system.

If Latour has failed to eradicate confusions between ‘network’ as a method and the World Wide Web (Latour 2005, 143), the field of literature and science has not completely shaken off the influence and repercussions of the “two cultures debate”—and it is perhaps unlikely that it will ever fully transcend the binary divisions it stipulates. However, ever since C.P. Snow first introduced the idea of the humanities and the sciences as two separate spheres or cultures in 1959, scholars have attempted to reconceptualise the relationship and highlight communalities, cross-overs, and cross-fertilisation between disciplines. And some of these attempts have gone a long way to inspiring fruitful interdisciplinary debates. Jerome Kagan, for example, examines the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities as “three cultures” and explores their interrelated struggles to “impose distinct meaning networks on their important concepts and […] compete with each other for dominance” (Kagan 2009, 6). Meanwhile, prominent proponents of the ‘one culture’ model, such as George Levine, do not negate important differences between the disciplines but rather “attempt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century
• 2. The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction
• 3. Neuropathologies: Cognition, Technology, and the Network Paradigm in Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Dave Eggers’s The Circle
• 4. New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction
• 5. Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body
• 6. Towards a Posthumanist Conceptualization of Society: Biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation
• 7. Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman
• 8. The Lures and Limitations of the Natural Sciences: Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree
• 9. “It’s for Fellows Only!”: On the Postcolonial Stance of Matthew Brown’s Maths Film The Man Who Knew Infinity
• 10. Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and the Technologies of Modernism
• 11. Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone
• Back Matter